The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(13)
Hazel let her gaze fall across the room, where a shaft of moonlight illuminated the spines of her mystery novels—one of which concealed Isaac’s letter. Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Gladys Mitchell, to name a few: they were all books she had read greedily as a child, but whose plots later congealed into a single generic mass. Once in a while, a certain character or revelatory moment would float back to her, but she could rarely remember which book or author. Now a fragment of something seemed to be calling to Hazel from the shelf—something to do with the murder of a paperback writer.
She got out of bed and threw on a pilled robe. She remembered the story now, or at least the end; the entire solution hinged on a single clue left on the ribbon of a typewriter. When the hero-detective unwound the spool, he found the final thoughts of the victim, including the identity of his killer, left in the negative imprint of inked ribbon: Mykilleris . . . The story, though not terribly sophisticated, had ignited her young imagination, and now—thinking of Isaac’s typewriter—she couldn’t get to his study fast enough.
She slipped out of the bedroom and made her way down the hall, careful to avoid the rickety floorboard. The house was still, and the only sound came from a chronically leaky bathtub faucet. Tat-a-tat-tat . . . The drips pounded the porcelain with the discipline of a drum machine, and it seemed that even in this tedious sound, her grandfather was present. Many years ago, Isaac had sat in the kitchen with her and Gregory, lip-syncing to the rhythm of an intensely weepy kitchen faucet with uncanny precision—tat-a-tat-tat-o-tat-a-tat-o-tat-tat!—while she and her brother giggled uncontrollably, delighted by his ability to inhabit the spirit of the tap.
“See, the drips only appear random,” he told them after their laughter subsided, “but if you listen carefully, you can pick out the pattern.” And with a pen, as if jotting off Morse code, Isaac marked out the dots and dashes of the “chaotic” system, which, he explained, was not chaotic at all—for chaos theory had been clumsily named. Short drip, long, short, silence. One could alter the system, making it more or less complex by loosening or tightening the handle. “And you know,” he continued, “bad plumbing isn’t the only thing that drips. The entire world drips, too, and if you pay very close attention, you can anticipate the next drop.”
Everything, of course, had been a game to her grandfather, and Hazel had to ask herself: Was he playing a game with her now?
The study was as she’d last seen it: all dark wood and heavy books, an egghead’s sanctum. She rolled aside his chair, ducked beneath the massive desk, and lifted Isaac’s ancient IBM from its home on the floor. A gentle tug of the cord revealed that it hadn’t been unplugged since its last use. She lifted the case and took out the ink cartridge, holding it to the desk lamp. She slowly pulled the ribbon loose like dental floss, but there were no fossilized letters in the ink, only shiny new ribbon. The cartridge had been replaced. She tipped the garbage can with her foot. Empty. So that was that.
As Hazel attempted to respool the ribbon, she heard a noise. After a pause, she heard it again. The floorboard outside. On instinct, she stood up and yanked the typewriter onto the chair, letting the ribbon fall to the floor. She rolled the chair under the desk and turned to the nearest bookshelf, pretending to examine the titles. The door opened, and Sybil, in a girlish nightgown that just brushed her knees, stepped into the dim light.
“Oh,” Hazel said, trying to appear cool, “did I wake you?”
Her cousin said nothing, just gazed sleepily in her direction.
She noticed, not without passing envy, that Sybil was just as radiant at two o’clock in the morning as she had been earlier that day. Hazel also gathered that she was, in fact, asleep. She had never witnessed one of her cousin’s sleepwalking episodes, though she had heard all the stories—the most repeated one involving Sybil’s wandering out of a Park Avenue hotel on her honeymoon, hailing a taxi, and a frantic Jack having to flag down his own cab and chase his silk-pajamaed wife all the way to LaGuardia Airport. There was an undeniable levelheadedness to Sybil’s nighttime adventures. She always put on shoes before stepping outside, and she had the uncanny ability to sleep-navigate.
Just as Hazel considered waking her cousin, Sybil fell against the door frame and muttered, “No, no, no. I told you already—” She let out a long whine and slid to the floor, where she began to quietly cry.
Hazel was about to prod her awake when the hall light came on, and Jack shuffled into view. He had a dark, brooding face, superficially similar to the men Hazel tended to like, Bennet included.
“There you are,” he said, sliding an arm around the weeping Sybil. “Sorry about this, Hazel.”
“Should we wake her?”
“Better not.” He pulled Sybil to her feet. Hazel thought he looked remarkably unrattled given his wife’s distress. Nor did he appear in the least bit curious about what Hazel was doing up this time of night. “Back to bed, darling.”
As Hazel watched the pair move toward the stairs, she wondered if her cousin was really the upbeat wife and mother she appeared to be in her waking hours.
When she could no longer hear the creaking stairs or the sobs, she closed the door and set the typewriter back on the desk. After respooling the ribbon and clicking it back into place, she was overcome with the need to write something. She rolled a piece of paper into the drum and began to peck at the keys, as if searching for a new form of communication with the dead.